Thriller Film Titles Analysis

Hey guys. my Media teacher set homework to analyse 3 thriller film's titles. There are links to the titles on the name of the film.

Strange Days (1995)

Title Designer: Kathyrn Bigelow

The titles start with different colour font of green, purple, red and yellow. The yellow font shows the date and time of what we hear to be a robbery. The whole shot is in the point of view of one of the robbers. You can hear a lot of swearing and jeering to portray strong characters. The movement of the camera is very swift to intensify the robbery. By the end of the scene the police come and a helicopter spots two of the criminals. The person who has the camera attached to them attempts to jump across a building but falls down, the camera cuts out showing colours of purple, green, yellow and red, just like in beginning. There is no music heard but at the beginning when the time and date is up it sounds like a bomb ticking off, this can show the seriousness of the task and they have a time limit to do it in.

Se7en (1995)

Title Designer: Kyle Cooper

At the start, the camera is focused on a open book, making it seem an object of significance for the whole title sequence. There are two different style of font which flicker, making the protagonist a twisted character. The book turns out to be a scrapbook of some kind that contains negatives, pictures and text from a book. The whole title is in some sort of point of view shot showing that the book belongs to the person. A stand out point of this is when the dollar bill is upside down with a main focus on the 'In God We Trust' part. This can resemble that the person is doing something that is against God's words. Later on, the word 'God' is taken out of the dollar which could symbolize that he is doing something that is bad.

The music sound very industrial and artificial, almost synth like. The bass line is constantly repeated and sounds very alien-esque. There is a lot of dissonance and the dynamic of the music goes from piano to forte.

Red Lights (2012)

Title Designer: Jorge Calvo

The title starts with a shrieking string ensemble. The violins make a pizzicato effect with correlate with fast motion of the lights which fade into the writing. There are various close ups on an alien like hand, eyes, a Jesus figure, some photo's and several other items. This is the use of mise-en-scene which shows relevant objects to the film. There is a lot of crescendo used to build tension in the music and long sustained notes. The base line sounds military-like showing there could be a political element to the film.